Parents of the HS Class of 2022

I am so sorry for your loss. :cry:

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I am so sorry for your loss. May his memory be a blessing.

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I am so sorry to hear of your loss. Peace to you and your family.

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Oh, I’m so sorry @OrangeFish. I know you will be glad to have your S home. May your DH’s memory be a blessing and peace to you. :hearts:

So very sorry to hear of your loss.

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I am so sorry. That type of Parkinsons is a double loss. For all involved. Wishing peace to you and your entire family.

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I am just coming back to this thread and so sorry for your loss, OrangeFish. This must be really hard on you and your kid. Sending comfort and care from afar.

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I don’t know if this thread is active but I came here looking for some advice. My daughter is finishing her first semester of college and her mental health is at an all time low. She went from maintaining a 3.6 GPA in high school to passing 2/5 of her classes this semester and she’s getting her scholarships taken away. She has tons of friends and she loves the school but she has a history of anxiety and depression and we suspect she might have an undiagnosed learning disability as well. We are already in contact with a therapist and she will be talking to someone when she gets back for winter break. Are any other parents experiencing this? Any tips?

So sorry to hear about your daughter’s experience. You may want to create a new thread just for this. You’ll receive far more responses.
My best wishes to you and your daughter.

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I’m so sorry. This must be incredibly hard. I hope you and your son can spend lots of time together over the winter holidays and can help each other through this very difficult time.

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I am so sorry @2022_Parent. I don’t have any great tips, but just wanted to say I’m sorry y’all are going through this. I have kids who have struggled with anxiety and depression in the past too. Do you know if she stopped going to class or if she just had trouble with the workload? I think talking to a therapist is a great first step. I agree that it sounds like she could have an undiagnosed learning disability. I hope you can get to the bottom of it.

See if you can get her to sign a HIPPA waiver and/or power of attorney so that you can talk to her health care providers, too, to be in the loop on the best way to provide support. I have a good friend whose college daughter was diagnosed with cancer this summer (slow growing and excellent prognosis with surgery). Having those papers signed has been a life-saver for them. Mom can arrange appointments and be looped in directly on support.

When one of mine was going through a rough patch with mental health I tried to get that HIPPA waiver signed but they wouldn’t do it. It made it difficult because once they turned 18 I could pay for the appointments but I couldn’t always set them up, could not talk to the providers about my kid’s progress, etc.

Best of luck!

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I’m guessing all the friends were too much of a distraction? It can be hard to focus and schedule study times when everyone is having fun, so maybe she felt she should be able to do everything like everyone else?
But not everyone can do everything. My D was quite ill and fell behind in her work, so since midterm, she has been busy catching up and has missed endless activities. There’s just too much to do with learning in such a small amount of time. It’s a bit of a waste being near a city when you are too busy to visit it. I’m beginning to see the sense of rural campuses. On the other hand, being close to a hospital has been handy.
She has a fresh semester coming up, and you can help her find some strategies over the winter break. Try to get her thinking positively about the new year…

Can she get a medical withdrawal for the failed classes? That would help with GPA in case she needs to transfer or get off academic probation.

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Colleges may vary in policy, but when I worked at a large university counseling center we would usually only write letters of medical withdrawal support for all classes (not just a select few) bc it made for more meaningful reasoning.

If not, students were more likely to be questioned by Student Affairs as to why they were (still) able to succeed in some classes if having example significant anxiety, depression, trauma, grief reaction, physical illness or injury, etc during the specified semester.

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Even a regular “W” would be better than a Withdraw/Fail. usually the deadlines are earlier but worth asking.

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I’m so sorry your daughter and your family are going through this. I went through something similar with my older daughter, and I agree with what many of the other posters are saying. First step is triage: to determine if withdrawal medical or otherwise is still possible (I don’t know where in the semester your school is). If she does medical it will have to be all of her classes, and you can get an appointment, even a virtual one with her primary care Dr to support the decision even if it’s a mental health crisis. I mention that because it may be faster to get in with your primary care Dr than a therapist and your Dr already has a relationship with your D so can evaluate the change in her. Side note: if you do the medical withdrawal and paid for tuition insurance at the start of the year you will get some of that tuition money back.

As far as the scholarship, have they told her she’s lost it? Or is she just going into a probationary period. Many times schools will allow for an “oops” semester and put students on probation to recover their grades and save their scholarship.

It sounds like you’ve got the therapist set up, which is good, but you again, may want to have her speak to her primary care dr for a referral to a psychiatrist in case medication is something that may be needed to manage her depression or anxiety. The psychiatrist or therapist may be able to refer you for whatever testing may be needed to determine whether learning disabilities are present. Her university may also have that testing available (not all schools do).

Once you’ve got her stable and out of the crisis, that’s the time to look back and reflect on what happened. Since it sounds like she was enjoying her time and had made friends, the hypothesis that she may have just underestimated the work time vs fun time ratio may be correct. I think many students get caught in this ( I was one once!). HS is very structured, college is very unstructured. It’s a big change for students, that, coupled with the change in the way grades are determined from HS to college (HS typically has more smaller assignments and extra credit opportunities vs college which may have only 3 graded tests or papers over the course of a semester), could have caught her off guard and over whelmed her. No shame in it. It happens to a lot of kids, a lot of very smart kids in fact! Most schools have something like a student or academic success center or department that focuses on helping students with tutoring, learning good study skills, etc, I recommend you look for that at her school as well.

I wish you the very best navigating this. I know how stressful it can be, but you obviously care about getting her the help she needs and just take it one step at a time and you will both get there.

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How’s everyone’s break going?

S22 and S20 arrived last weekend, and it has been a windfall of activities for S22 – dentist, required driving class, applying for his own credit card, and finally REU and other summer applications. So much for thinking I wouldn’t have to see another application till it came to grad school apps. And since S20 decided to stay for MS where he is, I thought that would be a long while.

S22 had a great semester, both academically and socially. He found his people both in his major and outside (clubs, his main EC, etc.). He has been especially happy about being accepted by the upperclassmen, something he was a bit concerned about as he took a bunch of small junior/senior honors level classes in his major. He won a university wide competition and was just offered an extra research opportunity for next semester on top of his current research.

He also managed to lose this, break that, and his travel experience was rather memorable :roll_eyes: Lessons learned. I hope

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Hello all,

I am actually a parent of DS23, but I find this thread super useful and a lot of stats of your children are very similar to my son’s. More importantly, you all have more experience in handling rejection/deferrals. I was pretty upset after he was rejected from REA Caltech and got a lot of insight from your experiences. I hope you all don’t mind asking my question here.

So, he took a Physics course in our local university this past semester (Sep - Dec’22) and has completed the finals. How can he report his official score to the colleges?

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Lol at your handle. Vazhthukkal!

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Our DS had transcripts sent directly from the university for his dual-enrollment courses. He had to request this via the university as per his GC. I would tell your student to ask their GC.

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